Goodebox is giving away two chances to win a package featuring 16 full size products
(a $285.00 value) from our June Goodebox brands!

This package features:
A set of Waxelene products, including a Jar of Waxelene and the Lip Tube; a set of Goddess Garden products including their Natural Sunscreen Continuous Spray, Natural Daily Lotion and Natural Facial Sunscreen; an Avitalin Bee Venom Biolift Complex; a set of Primal Pit Paste products including Pit Paste Jar, Pit Paste Stick, PoPo Powder, and Lip Balm; a Beauty Without Cruelty Vitamin C with CO-Q10 Hand & Body Lotion; a set of Blum Naturals products including their All Purpose Cleansing Wipes, Exfoliating Towelettes, Daily Normal Skin Towelettes, and Daily Eye Cleansing Pads and a Jillian Wright Product of your choice.

We’re back from our Euro honeymoon tour and it feels so good! Next time we go on vacation, it will definitely be less than 2 months, that was just too long. We had an amazing time – ate tons of delicious foods, walked miles and miles on end, got lost and then found ourselves. I would definitely recommend traveling with your partner before/after getting married (preferably before). You find out so much more about a person when they are out of their comfort zone. Luckily for us, we’re still married.

I’m glad I didn’t stress too much about what to pack. I ended up giving all of my clothes away as we went through each country so make room for new things to bring home. Best decision I made was bringing my not so favorite (yet comfortable) clothes.

Now we’re back in the motions of finding jobs and figuring out what to do next in general. And of course, entering facebook contests.

packing makes me want to cry, kind of. I’m procrastinating badly and instead of thinking about packing right now, I wanted to laugh at how much our itinerary has changed.

when we first began this adventure, our trip looked like this:
London – 2 days
Paris – 3 days
Barcelona – 2 days
French Riviera – 2 days
Venice – 2 days
Florence for the day
Rome – 3 days
Athens – 2 days
Mykonos – 4 days
Amsterdam – 3 days

now that everything is booked and we are done, it looks like this:
Brussels – 4 days
Amsterdam – 4 days
Paris – 7 days
Athens – 4 days
Mykonos – 4 days
Rome – 7 days
Nice – 4 days
Barcelona – 7 days
Marrakech – 5 days
Lisbon – 5 days

we extended our trip by an entire month and we’re still not sure if we’re coming home after that! just kidding, we have to come back to reality at some point.

oh geez, you guys. I can’t believe it’s been a month since I’ve been funemployed. no seriously, we are having the time of our lives. A quit his job right after I finished my contract and each day our most difficult objective has been what to make for breakfast. No more waking up in the dark and trying to throw clothes together. Now I wake up to A kissing me and handing me a mug of hot green tea. if this is what retiring would be like, sign me up pronto.

our dream is short lived since we’re gearing up for our trip in 2 weeks. we picked out backpacks, too! after much thought (mostly financial) we decided to go with:

with dimensions of 22″ x 14″ x 9″ and a light 2lbs, 12oz. we felt this was the best choice for us to take to Europe for 2 months. it opens like a suitcase, has a ton of cool compartments and their customer service has been great. with the price at $45 + free shipping – it’s the lowest i’ve ever seen it at (and i’ve been hawking this one out for a while)

we paid for these bags ourselves and wanted to share the news. nothing has been provided by the companies mentioned.

WOO HOO! I was so flippin’ stoked when A came home with my passport yesterday. It’s all dolled up with my new awesome last name. AND it expires on Valentine’s Day 2024, aww. I’ll be 35 and will have seen the world. Time flies when you’re having fun.

This glorious news also means that I’m 100% going to Europe!

We still need to buy our backpacks and are working on our routes, but other than that we’re almost good to go. Weather is going to be a pain in the arse because we’re legit switching from Netherlands weather to Greece/Spain/Morocco.

I actually just checked the weather everywhere (for today) and it’s 77 degrees in Florida, 40 degrees in Belgium, and 60 degrees in Morocco – to give you an idea of the contrast. I hope it stays cool during April this year. I would be happy with 50-70 degrees, yes.

Next week is my last week at work and then March is all for me! It’s all happening!

Omg yes. This week and next week are my LAST weeks at my current job. Maybe. I have this funny feeling that I will cross paths with my employer again. I’ve managed to hang on with them for an extra year after I initially “put my notice in” – but that didn’t work out at all like I had planned. Honestly, I think it worked out better this way.

Anyway, Europe update. So we’ve booked all 10 of our apartments via Airbnb which is awesome! We are very pleased with that. Slowly but surely we’ve also been booking the travel in between travel – flights, bus routes, train tickets. This part is not really that fun. I’ve actually asked many of our Airbnb landlords to help us plan our trip (for a few extra euros) and it has been a fabulous idea. Some of them readily offer trip planning services which is hassle free.

A got his passport back in the mail on Friday so he’s definitely going to Europe. I am half going, until I get my passport back. I hate worrying about it, I just want to get mine and be over with it already! Fingers crossed for today’s mail..

This month kicks off our countdown of 9 weeks until we leave for our honeymoon in Europe!

We don’t have our plane tickets, or anything else booked for that matter, so um, yeah, I’m a little stressed about it. 🙂 It will all come together though. A and I gave ourselves until the end of this month to have everything finalized. This trip was very spur of the moment, but with my job ending on the 28th, and A taking a hiatus from his job..we figured it would be the best time for us to take off and go.

Although going to Europe on a honeymoon is super exciting, I’m also looking forward to a clean slate and starting fresh when we get back. I have a couple job opportunities lined up already but is that really something that I want to do? I’m not sure yet. A and I talked about all of the different possibilities, of me going back to school while he works, or maybe I could get a part time job. I’m really excited to see what is in our future.

For now, my days consist of entering sweepstakes and making smoothies. I’m used to working 40+ hours a week at a full time job, this is definitely something different for me. A checks the mail when he gets home and is always surprised to see what goodies I have won! I can proudly say I’ve been able to pay for most of our trip gear with Amazon gift cards from around the web. Impressive, right? Yes. Back to sweeps for me..

I was 4 hours into my weekday routine (scouring travel sites for deals/eating peanut butter banana sandwiches) when I realized something in our itinerary was off. We had 4 days planned in each city, double what we had originally anticipated. Suddenly, we had collected an abundance of sight seeing time and I was so happy..and so oblivious.

Then it hit me: somehow in my haste I had forgotten Rome. One quite simply does not forget Rome.

It just so happens that revising our itinerary is pretty much my favorite thing to do right now. Still, it’s a bummer that we can’t pass go until we figure out what to cut out.

Planning a trip this big is really overwhelming. I’ve become obsessed with finding the best deals and cheapest rates. I think I may even dream in Kayak now..

Hot planning tip: put your itinerary into a calendar format (duh, right?). I googled “google docs calendar template 2014” and chose the one I wanted. I right clicked on the month tab that I needed and moved it to my original OMG EUROPE spreadsheet. Then I just changed the dates. Hopefully this will help keep me in line!

It’s been, like, a week since I posted our itinerary and we’ve already changed it quite a bit. I’m drowning in spreadsheets. A million different ones; packing lists, buying lists, places to see, places to stay – oh my, comparing all of the places to stay. Face palm.

After spending close to 6 hours engulfed in travel reservations for London – Aaron had to force me to stop. I picked a nice bed and breakfast in Hampstead. I could have kept looking for days. At least they offer free cancellation..just in case. 😉

We want our trip to have that easy-going-romantic-yet-see-as-much-as-we-can feel to it. To help us with our budget, we are planning on participating in free tours throughout Europe.

We’re not firm on it but we will shoot for a goal of $500 in each of the cities we’re going to visit. We’ll be making small sacrifices where we can (if we can), like a cheaper hotel in London so that we can spend the “leftover” cash on a nicer stay in Greece. London will end up costing us about $350-400 for 3 days, 2 nights all in. I felt good about that number. Until I saw the prices in Paris. Yikes.